Original Emerald View Park trail completed

“While we are constantly working to improve Emerald View Park’s infrastructure, these recent improvements make a huge difference in the usability of the park,” says Ilyssa Manspeizer, MWCDC director of Park Development and Conservation. Emerald View Park is Pittsburgh’s newest regional park, created in 2009 to bind together multiple parks and greenspaces in the Mount Washington and Duquesne Heights neighborhoods.

Completed by the Emerald Trail Corps, this new trail section provides a vital link from Sycamore Street through the Saddle and to Bigbee Field, where other trails begin and lead to Grandview Park. The Emerald Trail Corps is a green jobs program created by the MWCDC to provide adults facing barriers to employment with valuable skills through on the job training and professional development leading to future employment.

Additionally, the MWCDC achieved a challenging goal set in 2007 to clear the former dumpsite located across 13 acres in the valley between Route 51 and Marne Way in the Mount Washington section of Emerald View Park.

According to Ms. Manspeizer, “this dumpsite was of such a scale that most people, even MWCDC staff charged with managing the clean-up, felt it might never be finished.”

The final cleaning of the site in June, undertaken by an energetic group of volunteers from American Eagle Corporation, yielded nearly four tons of garbage, including 130 tires. Over the last six years, more than 300 volunteers have put in over 1000 hours of labor, painstakingly pulling more than 32,000 pounds of garbage up and out of the ravine.

Items removed range from small doll heads to entire cars. All garbage removed from the site was brought to appropriate disposal sites by the City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Public Works.